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Less than 2 months into the treatment I had my first adjustment. They changed my wire from a soft round one, to a square 20-gauge one. The new wire looks thicker, darker and is much sturdier.

Even according to the ortho, my teeth have made some incredible progress in less than 2 months, so my treatment is progressing by 2-4 months quicker than even he anticipated! That means that at my next adjustment on July 19th, they will add on micro-implants.

Usually micro-implants mean teeth implants or something like that. In my case however, it means that they’ll put titanium screws into my jaw bone in several places. Then they will anchor my back teeth to these screws so my back teeth will be pulled by the screws, without relying on my front teeth. Normally, people get powerchains or rubberbands to do this for them, however my bite and teeth alignment in the front are excellent according to the doctor and he doesn’t want to break that balance, so he’s going to use this fairly new technology on me. I’m very excited and what’s fun – all assistants at my ortho’s practice are also very excited, it’s a fairly new and interesting procedure for them (apparently it’s been practiced in Europe for 5 years and only 2 years or so in North America).

My upper midline has shifted and I now have spacing between my bottom center teeth but this is only temporary and will be all ok by the end of treatment. Teeth move around all the time, they literally change position and feel every day. I’m still not enjoying the “sponge” teeth feeling. I’ll be talking one minute, then I close my mouth and without even hitting the teeth very hard, I can feel them change position!

My teeth have moved very quickly so far, so I’m hoping my estimated 18-month treatment will be cut down to a year or so.

Progress photo:

5 days into my treatment I had to go in for an emergency appointment. I had so much movement that the upper teeth were chipping agains my bottom brackets. I have to say I only noticed because I was reading about it in a forum! I didn’t pay attention to the pressing feeling in my upper teeth, but when I looked, a good chunk of my upper right canine tooth was already chipped off in a neat rectangular pattern (some of the enamel has self-restored since then but the corner-shaped dent is still visible). If you have a slight – or not so slight underbite – watch out for this.

When I went to see the doctor, they had me fitted with occlusal bumps. The bumps are made of the same cement they use to bond brackets, but they color it blue so when it’s time to take them off, they’ll be able to tell it apart from the tooth.

This is 5 days into the treatment and right before I got the occlusal bumps. If you look closely on MY right upper, you can see the canine tooth sitting on top of a bracket.

3 weeks after braces were fitted (this was the best pic of the bumps I found).You can see my elastics are already slightly yellowed. Even though I’ve been drinking everything through a straw, some of it seeps through to the front of the teeth.

The bumps separate your upper and lower jaws, so you end up with a slightly open mouth – at all times. They make hard not just to eat, it’s hard to BREATH. For me in some ways this was worse than fitting of the braces themselves. For 3 days I felt a terrible strain in my neck, impossible to breath or swallow. Basically, I felt strangled.

With each uncomfortable adjustment it gets easier though. Your body must adjust to survive. It takes 2-3 weeks at most for your brain to get used to even most extreme new setups in the mouth, and usually it takes just a few days.

I should start by saying that I’m 26, about to turn 27 and I do not have a cosmetic need for braces. I get a lot of surprised looks from people who know me, not sure why I got the braces in the first place.

When I was 10 and 12, I had 2 molars (#6 teeth) pulled out on both sides. My teeth #7 and 8 have drifted closer to front and tipped in. When I open my mouth and you look from above, it actually looks like I have all my teeth in a row, no spacing. However, at the root level, my 7 and 8 teeth are tipped. There are large spaces at the root level and food always gets stuck there, it’s very hard to clean out those spaces, and I’ve had a few fillings on those teeth at the gum line. Lots of spacing actually makes it harder to clean teeth, than if they were very tight!

I got the idea to get braces in December 2005 and I lost sleep over it! I wasn’t sure if my husband would be supportive, since this is a pretty significant outlay of money (all out-of-pocket, we don’t have insurance) and he could reasonably say “Honey, your teeth are fine”.

So for 2 weeks I just tossed and turned, not sure how to even bring up this idea. Finally, lack of good sleep and anxiety made me break down. I just told it to my husband as it is – I don’t need it, but I want it, and it’s making me very weepy and won’t let me sleep. There was no resistance, just lots of eye-rolling on his part.

Ok, now that was out of the way and fully “sanctioned” . Next step would be to choose a doctor. I’ll just make this very short: I went to see 5 orthodontists and only chose to see specialists. I’m sure there are dentists good at ortho work out there, but I didn’t want to take my chances. By mid-February I selected an orthodontist that I felt was a perfect fit personality-wise, offered a solution to my problem that I could live with and, surprisingly, charged a very reasonable fee.
I’m in Toronto and my braces cost me $5,800 for all-ceramic Clarity brackets on both top and bottom. Each arch is $500 for upgrading to ceramics, so all-metal would’ve been $4,800. I’m too vain to be a metal-mouth, and even though Clarity brackets are slightly bigger than metal and my mouth feels fuller, I haven’t regretted my decision yet.

Besides a slightly larger size and fuller feel, there’s another downside to the ceramics. The brackets themselves are made of porcelain and do not stain no matter what you eat or drink; but he archwires (the metal wires) are being held in place using rubber elastics which are clear, that is they’re clear at the beginning and as time goes by, they take on the color of some foods, namely: tomato sauces, curries, dark berries, beets, coffee, tea, wine etc.

You eventually work out a weird system of eating coloring foods, flipping it with your tongue to the roof of the mouth, by-passing the front of the teeth And I now drink coffee and tea trough a straw (only once the drinks cool, of course! Wouldn’t want to be drinking chemicals the plastic straw releases into my hot drinks). But my ortho – and most of them, from what I hear – won’t mind replacing the elastics as often as you need. I got them grossly yellow a couple of times and went in for a replacement. I also go nuts with curries and wine before any emergency appointments or adjustments because I know they can replace the elastics without any extra trips.

On March 29th, 2006 I had the braces fitted. This is what it looked like:

Originally published on December 25, 2004.

I’ve been brushing my teeth with a manual brush all my life. About a year ago, all the ads with the new affordable battery-operated toothbrushes finally got to me.

For the record, I’ve tried Oral-B PowerMax, Oral-B PowerMax Advanced and Crest Complete battery-operated brushes in the course of the year.

Crest “died” pretty quickly. It still kept working but even with the new replacement heads and new batteries it just plain SUCKED at brushing. It almost felt like a manual brush did a better job (I was forced to switch to manual because I just couldn’t stand Crest).I had a pretty good experience with the 2 cheapo Oral-B’s and I have to say, even for cheap brushes they’re quite good, especially when compared to Crest.

I can’t say anything about Colgate except this: I turned one on at a store to see the rotation, sound and feel of it, and put it back immediately. Right down there with Crest in my book.

In my vanity quest… ok, it’s for health more than for beauty…, I decided to upgrade to a nicer power brush

After some research, plus based on my own experience and on what my dentist told me, I was only considering these 3:

• Sonicare
• ORAL-B Sonic Complete
• ORAL-B 3-D Excel

Sonicare turned out to be quite bulky, slightly noisier than Sonic Complete, and replacement heads are 40% more expensive than any for ORAL-B.

ORAL-B Sonic Complete is quiet, with a “sonic” kind of sound, almost like an insect, moves super fast, has 2 and 3-mode models. Really had nothing against this one and it was a very strong contender. All research has only good things to say, and it’s convenient to hold esp. if you compare to the big Sonicare. I was set on Sonic Complete until I came across a sale for…

ORAL-B 3-D Excel
Instead of the regular $100 it was on sale for $69 (Canadian!). It’s the same price like on Amazon as of now (Dec 25, 04).
Seeing a deal this good, I wanted to see if the brush was any good! Of course, I read up on these brushes on Amazon. At Amazon the ratings for Oral-B and Sonicare are about equal. Read some other stuff.
I went back to the store a couple of times to see the brushes in operation. Since you can’t really go to a store and try out all the brushes on your own teeth, you can just judge whether you like the size, the sound and if you believe it’s any good
I believe this brush has an advantage compared to Sonic Complete – it’s the small head. Of course you can get larger “dual action” standard size replacement heads for the 3-D Excel, but I like the small round one, cause I feel like the action is more concentrated, it allows me to clean each separate tooth more thoroughly.

FINAL NOTES
I like that Oral-B is made in Germany. It’s really, truly well-made. I’m a sucker for German gadgets (writing another review on one). The point of course is not how well it’s made even though it’s important, but whether it works or not.
In the first 3 days I’ve noticed the following improvements:
My teeth really feel clean even if I brush and then eat. It seems they’re so much better polished that plaque doesn’t stick to them as much.

If I brush and don’t eat for a few hours (sleeping doesn’t count), I don’t get a nasty taste and feel in the mouth. It stays clean and fresh!

Tiny little stain on my 4th front tooth is starting to disappear. No amount of scrubbing with baking soda seemed to help, but the brush is so far helping.

Other notes:
The brush is made so water and paste shouldn’t get into it, but I still wipe it dry with a towel after use – just in case… cause I like it so much

Expect drooling with this brush! It’s hard to close your mouth while brushing without knocking teeth
If you’re used to brushing with a lot of toothpaste, instead of squeezing it on the brush head, just smear it all over your teeth, cause you just can’t fit in that much paste on the small round head, and really, you don’t need to use that much.

Since I originally published this review, a multitude of newer and better brushes were invented. I have switched to Oral-B Sonic Complete in May 2006. It’s been amazing, should’ve bought it the first time around! It’s much gentler on the gums than the rotary brushes.